Predictive analytics reveals tomorrow, today.

Today, more than ever, customer intelligence is critical to beating the competition. But with so much unstructured data out there, how do you put it all together to understand your customers as individuals? Predictive analytics helps you forecast and deliver what your audiences are craving.

Read The Holistic Picture to learn how multiple sources of data can be transformed into unified customer profiles. Download now ›

So much data, so few insights. Despite the availability of vast storerooms of data, marketers often still lack real-time visibility into audience behaviors. They struggle to quickly and effectively analyze massive volumes of online and offline data, finding it difficult to determine which audiences to target for maximum impact — especially high-value customers.

The answer is predictive analytics. Predictive analytics provides a statistical evaluation of what your customers might do in the future. Using predictive modeling, data mining, and machine learning, predictive analytics takes historical data and generates insights into potential behavior.

You can connect data points like online interactions, point-of-sale transactions, or mobile events by using analytics to sift through data, sharing your brand story in a more forward-looking way. And you can apply the insights coming from your predictive analytics engine to take advantage of opportunities to improve your audience engagement.

But how do you do all this without an army of data scientists? How do you merge authenticated and unknown data so you can refine who you target and what content you send? It takes machine learning to make sense of disconnected data. It takes visualizations to provide insights that drive better marketing decisions. And it takes predictive modeling to inform future one-to-one engagements.

A predictive marketing analytics solution such as Adobe Analytics allows you to:

Visualize what’s happening on your website in real time

Analyze the customer interactions that contribute to traffic anomalies

Create unified audience segments

Deliver automatically targeted content based on customer profiles

Visualize your audiences.

Visualizations powered by Adobe Analytics help you see what actions and events are occurring through your website and mobile apps. For example, Adobe's Live Stream visualization is a real-time events fire hose that pulls granular data into your live-traffic dashboard. Insights gained from these visualizations allow you to respond quickly, improving customer engagement.

With clear visualizations, you identify who is interacting with your web and mobile properties. You can query millions of independent values instantly that uncover what interactions and viewing behavior visitors are having on your site. By visualizing your audiences, you can become better at retargeting lost opportunities, improving call center interactions, or informing key stakeholders about customer behavior.

Once you're able to identify your audiences, the next step is to analyze what's happening. Analytics allow you to better understand positive and negative trends that are impacting your business across all your digital channels.

At times, unusual shifts in data might occur. Anomaly Detection monitors activity over time for irregularities. You're able to identify statistically significant shifts in your key metrics that fall outside of expected ranges. For example, Anomaly Detection can reveal that email registrations during a specific period are below normal rates. Adobe Analytics uses powerful machine learning to intelligently identify this pattern. But that's only part of the story.

Contribution Analysis then looks for reasons why the drop-off is occurring. You can select the metrics you want to focus on in order to identify contributing factors. The analytics engine saves you countless hours of searching for explanations.

Identifying trends and unusual events doesn't help unless the insights you gain allow you to better target valuable audiences.

Create high-value audiences.

Identifying trends and unusual events doesn't help unless the insights you gain allow you to better target valuable audiences. Once you have all your data organized, it's time to create audience segments that will respond.

Segment IQ allows you to discover the differences that make up your audience segments. It does this through an automated analysis of your metrics and campaign dimensions. As Segment IQ runs the analysis, you can also reveal key audience characteristics that are driving your KPIs. You're able to run comparisons to see overlapping qualities shared by multiple segments.

Audience Clustering takes this a step further by intelligently and automatically identifying distinct segments of valuable customers for further targeting. To widen your scope, you can push segment data out to Adobe Audience Manager to apply lookalike modeling, which uncovers similar audience segments. Then you can send those newly defined segments into Adobe Target or Adobe Campaign.

You can use Propensity Scoring to learn which customer traits and behaviors have a high likelihood of impacting a future outcome. Then your predictive analytics engine scores each person on their likelihood of completing an action. Now you can identify likely outcomes beforehand and send personalized content to your most relevant audiences.

Deliver targeted content.

Once your audience segments have been identified, you are ready to improve the customer experience. With Adobe Target, you can automate the process of deciding which content to deliver. You don't have to rely on a team of analysts at your side to be able to automatically deliver highly-targeted content.

Based upon predictive analytics from Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target helps you distribute personalized, engaging content that results in a rewarding experience. For example, when Adobe Analytics identifies website visitors who have abandoned a shopping cart while on their desktops, Target will select which product-related content to use for retargeting their mobile devices.

Once audiences have been identified, Adobe Target allows you to refine your targeting efforts with:

Testing — use various testing strategies to get a clear understanding of the best opportunities for delivering targeted content

Connecting Adobe Analytics with Adobe Target lets you improve customer experiences, touching your high-value audiences at the right place and right time with the right message.

Predictive analytics drives your integrated marketing platform.

Early adopters of predictive analytics recognize the value in knowing what's ahead. Will your high-value audiences continue to engage? Can we identify where they may drop off? True value is realized when you can do something with that knowledge. That takes an integrated marketing platform.

Your platform should allow you to combine analytics from online and offline experiences. Insights gained from your data sources should then be used to find and target your best audiences. You must have the ability to test content and predict what to change. You should be able to automate the selection of content based on historical results. Your campaigns should be built on personalized, one-to-one experiences.

Ultimately, you have to see measurable improvements for your business. Predictive analytics plays a key part in achieving this. For early adopters of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, measurable improvements have become the norm. Many have experienced results such as:

Improved time-to-value through reduced analysis time

Better customer experiences through more compelling engagement

Predictability and repeatability of investments in processes and programs

Better and faster decisions as organizations have become more data-driven

With the help of predictive analytics, your brand can improve customer acquisition, conversion, and retention as you create better experiences for your audiences.

Adobe can help.

Staying one step ahead of your customers means you must identify trends and behaviors. Predicting future actions is easier with data you can act on. Adobe Analytics provides the engine you need to make smarter decisions. Combine Adobe Analytics with Adobe Target to boost engagement, personalize campaigns, and deliver relevant content.